Archive for the ‘C.O.A.T. – Money’ category

Mayor Nutter said yesterday that five of the 11 library branches once scheduled to close permanently on Thursday are instead on track to be taken over by private foundations, wealthy individuals, companies, and community development corporations.

It was not immediately clear which branches have sponsors and the mayor did not identify the benefactors.

But Nutter expressed confidence that in time private operators could convert each of the branches now on his budget chopping block into community “knowledge centers” that would offer similar or perhaps even superior services to those now available. Though the services would vary from branch to branch, Nutter said the centers would likely retain book collections, computers, and perhaps even trained librarians.

Emphasis added by me.

This guy is certainly true to form to his surname: Nutter.

Hey, how’d you like to have to rely on, say, the Exxon-Mobil Knowledge Center for information about the oil companies?

I could go on in that vein and get really inflammatory, but fuck it, this blog dies tomorrow and I’m burned out as it is doing this.

This is the systematic destruction of the world as we have known it by the same bastards who brought us to this brink.

The head of the National Development and Reform Commission, Zhang Ping, said “grave risks” lay ahead for goals of fast growth and high employment if the government did not manage to stimulate demand and maintain export growth.

Emphasis added by me.

We all think of Germany as one of the richest nations on the planet. They just opened my eyes to a dimension I hadn’t fully considered:

In a sign of the times in Germany, poodles, terriers and sheepdogs queued up for rations in the country’s first soup kitchen for pets, housed in a disused school in the former communist east Berlin.

The soup kitchen was opened in October and offers free food for pets belonging to pensioners and the growing ranks of Berlin’s unemployed.

Let me try to explain the situation in a manner I think everyone can understand.

Your Windows XP PC has been running for several hours. It’s really a unit a few years old, but that’s what you have to deal with. Firefox has been running because you’ve been on the Internet all that time.

With your limited CPU and RAM, every time a new browser tab is opened, you risk everything seizing up. It’s almost like Browser Roulette: Which tab will lead to a website with so much Flash and Javascript crap that it will totally freeze Firefox?

Our economic system is old. Every new fraud has been a new browser tab. The system has frozen. It is going to crash.

Now, when you reach that point with your PC, what do you do? Do you just take the PC and throw it away? Of course not.

With XP and Firefox there are two choices:

1) Bring up Task Manager and kill the Firefox application. But that doesn’t necessarily free up fragmented RAM, so things could still run slow when Firefox is launched again.

2) You kill Firefox via Task Manager and then reboot the PC.

You’re still using the same system, but now everything has a fresh start.

This is what needs to be done with the entire worldwide economic system from all the way at the very bottom to the top.

Worldwide economic reboot.

The only way that can happen is for every government to agree that we’ve all screwed up. The only way out is a synchronized reboot of the system.

And we are not not not going to have worldwide suffering to prove a goddammed point of ideology.

Ideas are created to serve people.

We do not create ideas to enslave us.

I am not offering this up as a suggestion, either.

I am telling you that every single one of you is going to recognize this as the only way out of this mess, period. It’s inevitable, it’s unavoidable, and it’s the only only only thing that will work.

Everyone is going to left holding a bag of shit at the end, one way or the other, from very rich to very poor.

But our nations will be intact, our infrastructure will be intact, the flows of information will remain intact, our populations will not be sick and dying and frustrated, and the massive release of productive energy this will create will be unprecedented in all of human history.

Recognize that.

I pray you all do so before the chaos really begins and gets out of hand.

What makes matters more worrying still is that for many there is no way out of this nightmare. The housing market has gone into freefall, with negative equity now widespread.

Properties are being marked down by as much as 50 per cent – and still not shifting. New building has virtually stopped.

Couples are being forced apart, as husbands or wives head home in a desperate attempt to find work.

Emphasis added by me.

That one sentence is what millions of you will be paraphrasing in 2009 and 2010:

What makes matters more worrying still is that for many there is no way out of this nightmare.

Emphasis added by me.

Those are the extreme cases. What is so extraordinary about the situation unfolding on the Costas is the suffering of the silent majority. Those most hard-hit are individuals who least expected to find themselves in financial difficulties.

Having worked hard all their lives, they took the decision to move to Spain to improve the quality of their lives in retirement.

Emphasis added by me.

‘None of us came to live in Spain without money,’ she points out. ‘Unlike Britain, which has an open door policy for anyone who arrives without even a penny to their name, we knew that if you came to Spain you had to have money to survive.

‘We brought our own money with us and we invested it wisely. We bought our own homes and we have never taken a penny from the state. But what is happening now is that we are being buried by economic factors beyond our control. It’s really worrying.’

Emphasis added by me.

But when they decided the Spanish lifestyle was not for them and put the property on the market, they were in for a rude shock.

‘I never really settled in Spain,’ explains Jan, 68. ‘I missed my grown-up children and Barrie had sick relatives in the UK who needed looking after, so we made the decision to move home. This time last year we put the house on the market for £228,000 – but there has been no interest in it,’ she says.

‘Previously, you would have just dropped the price a bit, but because of the collapse of the market we have been told that that would make no difference.

‘We need to make enough to pay off our £100,000 mortgage and to buy a small flat back in England, but there aren’t even property developers out there willing to take it off our hands. As it stands now, our dream house is worthless.’

If that weren’t bad enough, the couple are struggling to make ends meet. Barrie’s pension has fallen by 300 euros a month, while their mortgage repayments and everyday costs have all gone up.

‘Taking everything into consideration, we have worked out that after all our outgoings in November 2007 we had 310.41 euros left over every month,’ says Jan.

“The economy is in much worse shape than we thought it was in,” Biden told me during an exclusive interview — his first since becoming vice president-elect — to air this Sunday on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”

“There is no short run other than keeping the economy from absolutely tanking. That’s the only short run,” Biden told me.

Emphasis added by me.

Well, first, the economy is in worse shape than 99.999% of people realize. And in our government, that figure is even higher for widespread ignorance.

And what’s the prescription from Doctor Obama?

Biden said he has canvassed Republican and Democratic members of Congress about a second “big” and “bold” stimulus package. He said the Obama team is focused on creating jobs and spending on energy and information technology infrastructure.

“Every single person I’ve spoken to agrees with every major economist. There is going to be real significant investment, whether it’s $600 billion or more, or $700 billion, the clear notion is, it’s a number no one thought about a year ago,” he said.

Many people — including yours truly — have looked to events of 80 years ago to try and figure out how things might play out in future. But maybe it isn’t necessary to go back that far. There have been other economic implosions in more recent times that might offer lessons that are just as illuminating. In fact, one of my regular visitors, Jason, suggested that I check out a blog, Surviving in Argentina, published by an anonymous Argentinean, which offers up some disturbing but absorbing accounts of life in that beleaguered Latin American nation. After reading a post written a few weeks ago, entitled “Despair in Once-Proud Argentina,” it made me wonder whether we will see an equally calamitous ending here.

If this account doesn’t make you cry, please do the rest of us a favor and kill yourself. You are too deluded to face reality — or you’re one of the sociopathic pathogens infecting this nation.

A few clips:

“I can’t explain it, and maybe I never will be able to[.] [. . .] But maybe you can start to figure out why. You have to wonder: Is all this really happening? Are our politicians so corrupt? Are we now really so poor? Have the banks really stolen our money? And the answers are yes, yes, yes and yes.”

And:

“Am I proud of what we did? No, of course not. Would I do it again? Yes, of course. You start to live by different rules.“

Emphasis in the original.

With each post, I am trying to plant into your head in ways that cannot be avoided how absolutely horrific the breakdown of our advanced society can — will — be.

Because I don’t want it to happen to us!

“You can’t know what it’s like to see your children hungry and feel helpless to stop it,” she said. “The food is there, in the grocery store, but you just can’t afford to buy it anymore. My husband keeps working, but he keeps bringing home less and less. We never had much, but we always had food, no matter how bad things got. But these are not normal times.”

Emphasis added by me.

I paused while creating this post to read the comments for it. That caused me to add my own Comment, which is a fitting way to end this post:

You’ve been given the very rare privilege here of seeing the breakdown of an advanced society into absolute horror. Some of you are thinking, unsaid, “Oh, it’s just those effing spicks, that’s how they are!” The other lot are thinking, “Hey, my gun will be my passport!”

Both of you are unfit for survival with what’s coming up.

Your “solution” — such as it will be — is YOU. What the hell do you think made this country, a pack of crybabies telling the proto-revolutionaries, “Oh, give us a solution EXCEPT overthrowing Old George”?!

Your money is shit.
Your gold is shit.
Your gun is shit.

Start there and YOU can begin to CREATE some solutions.

FA, thanks much for this post. I’m linking to it.

And so I have.

Update: For those who will stupidly dismiss this account because it’s from a “Doom site,” here’s the original source: The Washington Post!